A Pal to Stars, Mobsters and Other Crumb Bums

By JODY ROSEN

Published: September 17, 2007

CORRECTION APPENDED

One day in 1997, when Kristi Jacobson was working in the documentary division of ABC News, she glanced over a co-worker's shoulder and noticed Toots Shor's name in the New York Times crossword puzzle. Ms. Jacobson casually mentioned that Mr. Shor, the fabled New York saloonkeeper, was her grandfather. Her colleague, a history and sports buff, ''freaked out,'' Ms. Jacobson, 36, recalled recently.

''It was embarrassing, but I had to admit that I didn't know much about my grandfather,'' Ms. Jacobson said. When Shor died in 1977, Ms. Jacobson was all of 6 years old. There were a few pieces of memorabilia in her parents' Rumson, N.J., home -- autographed photos of Shor with President Dwight D. Eisenhower and other famous friends -- but the family rarely discussed Shor, and Ms. Jacobson had little sense of his cultural significance.

That brief conversation with a colleague sparked a decade-long immersion in the life and lore of Shor, the Runyonesque character who turned the role of restaurateur into a celebrity archetype, became a symbol of the city's midcentury apotheosis, and addressed everyone from bus drivers to movie stars with his signature epithet, ''crumb bum.'' The result is ''Toots,'' Ms. Jacobson's feature-length documentary, which made its debut on Friday in New York to favorable reviews.

Ms. Jacobson's film sets Shor's bootstraps rise and long, sad decline against the backdrop of 20th-century American social history: Prohibition, the growth of the Mafia, the golden age of baseball, the tumult and fragmentation of the 60s. But ''Toots'' is above all a New York story, a reminder, at a moment when Manhattan is awash in wealth and celebrity as never before, that the city's sizzle was once embodied by a sports bar in Midtown: a place of glamour and egalitarianism, where Joe DiMaggio and Frank Sinatra and Ernest Hemingway rubbed elbows with working stiffs.

''What I want people to understand is that New York at one time -- at the time when it emerged as the capital of the world -- wasn't just slightly different,'' Ms. Jacobson said over lunch on the Lower East Side. ''It was drastically different. I wanted to look at this slice of history and ask: What are those things that New York has lost, the things we mourn?''

Ms. Jacobson, who has directed documentaries on the Teamsters union, women's rights and other political topics, was aided in her efforts by an all-star team of New York grandees.

After deciding to pursue the project, she sent a fax to Walter Cronkite requesting an interview. Two days later Ms. Jacobson got a message: ''Kristi, it's Walter Cronkite. I knew and loved Toots. What can I do to help you?''

The toughest ''get'' turned out to be her own mother, Kerry Jacobson, one of Shor's four children with his wife, the former Ziegfeld Follies dancer Marion Shor, known as Baby. ''My mother had never agreed to be interviewed about Toots before,'' Ms. Jacobson said. ''The children were raised to keep their lives private, not to brag. It just wasn't her instinct to talk about, you know, how her dad had turned up at her confirmation with John Wayne.''

The Toots Shor depicted in the film lived a New York myth, a provincial arriviste who remade the city in his own image. The son of Orthodox Jewish immigrants, Bernard Shor was born in Philadelphia in 1903. (He was given his nickname by an aunt. ) He came to New York at the age of 20 and found work as a bouncer in speakeasies, where his geniality and brawn endeared him to his gangster bosses and high-rolling patrons. Both would find a home at Toots Shor's, which opened in 1940 at 51 West 51st Street. In the film the former football star Frank Gifford recalls seeing the Luciano crime-family boss Frank Costello on one side of the room and the Supreme Court chief justice Earl Warren on the other.

Mr. Brokaw, who grew up in South Dakota during the restaurant's heyday, remembers the allure it held even for those in the Great Plains. ''You dreamed of making it to New York and going to Toots Shor's, to become part of that mystique,'' Mr. Brokaw said.

A hulking 6-foot-1-inch man, Mr. Shor towered over many of the athletes who frequented his restaurant and made his friend Jackie Gleason look almost svelte. (In one episode he literally drank Gleason under the bar, leaving him on the floor so patrons had to step over him to enter the restaurant.)

Today, in the age of the velvet rope and the V.I.P. room, it seems improbable that stars could once have mixed so easily with ''civilians'' and journalists. It was a time when Mickey Mantle made little more money than columnists covering him. But the openness of Toots Shor's reflected the proprietor's code, the value he placed on a man's ability to hold his drink and to command the attention of a tableful of world-class raconteurs.

''Toots'' doesn't shy from the difficult stuff, chronicling Shor's organized-crime connections and descent into alcoholism after a second version of his restaurant went belly up. His decline becomes a metaphor for larger changes: the end of New York's baseball heyday with the move of the Dodgers and Giants to California, the shifting of the city's nightlife epicenter away from Midtown and the wider upheavals of the '60s, in which the boys club atmosphere that predominated at Toots Shor's -- unescorted women were not allowed in the joint -- gave way to new kinds of inclusiveness.

Still, there was something lovable about Shor's excesses. His spectacular business failures were the result of his largesse and outsize lust for fun: too many drinks on the house, too much money spent gambling on horse races and boxing matches.

Shor's New York is long gone, but that Tootsian spirit is summoned by dozens of lustrous black-and-white photographs taken by the restaurant's photographer. Ms. Jacobson searched for them for years to no avail. Finally she contracted a private investigator, who located the trove in a Southern California home. Ms. Jacobson's grandfather would have approved of the deal she struck to pay the gumshoe's retainer.

PHOTO: Toots Shor outside his 51st Street bar-restaurant in 1962. A new documentary by his granddaughter examines his life. (PHOTOGRAPH BY BETTMANN/CORBIS)

Correction: September 20, 2007, Thursday
A picture caption in The Arts on Monday with an article about a documentary film about the fabled New York saloonkeeper and restaurateur Toots Shor misidentified one his restaurants that was shown. It was his second restaurant, on West 52nd Street -- not his first, on West 51st Street.